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When Betty Comden and Adolph Green were introduced to Francois Truffaut in Paris in the 1960s they listened in "total disbelief as the French director informed the writers oí Singin' in the Rain "that he had seen the film many times, knew every frame of it, felt it was a classic, and that he and Alain Resnais, among others, went to see it regularly at a little theatre called the Pagoda where it was even at that moment in the middle of a several-month run." 1 Subsequently, Truffaut has said in print that one of the movies he remembered affectionately as being "on the same subject" (i.e, a movie about making movies ) when he began to film his Day For Night was Singin' in the Rain, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.2 I think that there is indeed evidence in Day For Night that Truffaut knows the classic Hollywood musical well and that the links between it and his film are more than casual; in effect, indications are that the earlier film (1952) considerably influenced the later one (1975) and that, although they treat the same subject, they cannot be described as simply "movies about making movies."
Of course, both films do center on the business of making motion pictures but are set in different times and places. Singin' in the Rain takes place in the Hollywood of 1927 whereas Day For Night presents conditions of filming in contemporary France. Singin' in the Rain begins with the premiere of a costume romance, The Royal Rascal, a silent film starring Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) and comes full circle, after ninety minutes or so, to a second premiere, that of an early sound musical, The Dancing Cavalier, starring the same performers. In between, the audience witnesses the tribulations of players and technicians at the fictional studio, Monumental Pictures, coping with the "new" sound medium after the initially silent The Dueling Cavalier is turned into a disastrous talkie, salvaged when it is reshot as a musical in which Line's strident talking and singing voice is dubbed by a young, unknown player, Kathy Seiden (Debbie Reynolds), with whom Don has fallen in love. Truffaut's film concentrates on the making of only one...